Close-Up

What are stories for? Buddhist theory asserts that one of the reasons we’re unsettled in our lives is because we spend most of our time telling ourselves stories––of the past; of the future; of the subjunctive-pluperfect-conditional-but-nonetheless-recently-expired-present––at the irrevocable cost of the present. (Go to any stadium performance and count the thousands of people taping the concert or taking pictures instead of just listening to it if you need this idea in terms of the staggeringly stupid.) Our culture is obsessed with real events (e.g. reality t.v.) because we experience hardly any.

In the above sense, stories preclude us from living. But in quite another, stories help us live more fully. Those stories we often call art. So here’s a question. What form should this art take? Should it be a story-story (fiction?) or a real-story (non-fiction)? I’ve heard both claims in book-club recently: “Let’s read only non-fiction, because fiction is filled with gay unicorns’’ and its anti-matter claim, “The world exists. Why re-create it?”

Close-Up is a tender portrait of a man in love with cinema––an art form which doesn’t outright reject the fantasy that the life of poverty we are born into is the only life we can have––and willing to lie to himself and to others to express that love, first to himself and then to the object of his love. But fantasies come at a price and the pied piper of reality shall be repaid.

But this choice between fiction and non-fiction is false, a dualistic way of approaching a complicated problem. That’s because when we are not sure is when we are most alive. As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments. Our lives aren’t prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art––underprocessed, underproduced––splinters and explodes. Which is what the structure of Close-Up does. But it doesn’t do it in the way that Cinema Paradiso does––that goober of a movie made by a petulant child with a box of crayons––no, it does what all great works of art do: it dissolves its genre and shows us the laziness of our preference for one or the other forms of story-telling.

This is a heartbreaking movie about a man who is too sensitive for the hardships of life and a delicate and tough poem about the beguiling ways in which art makes fools out of all of us. A